It’s settled: The release party for CURRENCY is going to be at The Hideout on May 16, from 5:00-7:00. A string of exclamation marks cannot express how unduly happy I am. During the last few months, it’s seemed that the securing of this particular venue has had about as many ups and downs as my decade-long struggle to get the novel published.

You know, I will admit that early on in the struggle to get published, I had dreams of worldly success. I dreamed that I might actually sell the book, as in get some real money from it. Not sick money, not mad money—even in my starry-eyed youth, I never set my sites too high—just some, enough. The number became more specific after my son was born. The year he turned two, the manuscript first made the agented rounds of the big houses and my employer started insisting that I work five days a week instead of the four I was barely managing. I figured if I could get an offer in the mid five figures, I’d have enough to take that job and shove it, at least for a year or so, at least for long enough to cobble together some kind of modestly remunerative professional writing life. And I was willing to hustle: I’d do magazine features! I’d happily teach undergraduates! Anything, as long as paying the bills and caring for my kid would not be at such hot war with me getting writing time.

Well, most of those dreams, even as dreams, have died. My job provides our family’s health insurance and most of our income, and I read plenty about the dismal economics of publishing today. I accept that there’s no peace treaty pending between my writing life and the rest of it, that I just have to get more skilled in the trenches, and I’ve become more convincing when I tell myself that economic justification isn’t necessary. No, it’s the deeper satisfaction of seeing a personal project come to fruition that I’m fueled by now—and it is deep, and I am fueled. But during the ups and downs of booking The Hideout, it’s become clear to me that there’s still one external reward I’ve been holding out for, one very clear image I have of success. It’s smoking a cigarette on The Hideout’s porch after having had a book release party. That, to me, will equal a dream come true.

Now, I quit smoking on December 31, 1998. And I have truly kicked the habit, save for the special occasion. (Ah, for the special occasion.) But the sense memory of nicotine haunts me like an old lover. Or like all the old lovers. All the old friends, the eras and places and discoveries of youth. CURRENCY, too, is wrapped up in this acrid cloud of nostalgia: I smoked my way through Southeast Asia and wrote most of the first draft during a time when I sat at my desk at home and puffed away. Who, even among smokers, lights up inside now? It’s a freaking part of history, like horse-drawn carts. To further out myself as old: I have also enjoyed cigarettes on domestic flights, in college dining halls, and at the desk of my first office job. And of course I smoked—a lot—in the more typical places: bars.

I realize that smoking in bars is no badge of wizened coddgerhood, that up until 2008 anyone in Chicago could. On the eve of the ban I really longed to go on a cigarette tour of the scenes of old crimes and say a proper good-bye, but I was six months pregnant. Missing this last boat has left me with an unresolved yearning, and The Hideout’s front porch is about as close as it gets to public indoor smoking: There’s not that lovely stale air, but you can simultaneously sit down, hold a beer, light a cigarette, and converse. At first unconsciously, I’ve come to believe that this comfortable compromise, this celebration of the old in the manner of the new, is the single best way to mark the occasion of CURRENCY’s publication.

I’m not so aged that I took up smoking without knowing it was poison. In a way, the paradox has always been part of a cigarette’s charm: This will kill you, but doesn’t it make the moment sublime? Ah, yes. Yes, it does. Let the beautiful sad music play. My youth is behind me. I can no longer live for the moment, for only myself. In more than one sense, I do not have much time. But I do have this family, this life, and soon, I will have published a novel. A single cigarette still tastes divine.

And if it’s raining or something? If there’s construction on Wabansia and The Hideout’s porch is torn up? If I have bronchitis, or the cops shut the deal down because there is probably some ordinance against it? Well . . . could happen. We’ll see.

But, won’t you please join us at The Hideout on May 16? Which, by the way, is a request I can only make thanks to my friend Martha Bayne, who, in addition to being a stalwart smoking partner since the time when ten dollars would buy you a carton of Camel Lights, also knows how to make all kinds of good things happen there.